I find it surprising that YouTube has actually been around for 8 years now. It doesn’t seem that long ago online video was brand new and pretty low quality. Today, 720p and 1080p video is the norm, full movies streaming is commonplace, and online video looks set to kill disc-based content releases in the not too distant future.

Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has regularly been setting new records with the amount of content being uploaded and streamed to users. In May 2011, Google announced that YouTube was handling 48 hours of video uploads every minute. By January 2012 that had increased to 60 hours a minute. Jump forward to today, and YouTube has hit three figures–every minute now sees over 100 hours of video uploaded. That’s 1 hour and 36 minutes of video every single second. Or 250 days worth of video every hour being added to the service.

Handling such a large amount of video will surely keep the staff at Google’s data centers very busy. Adding new storage and servers to cope with all that content must be a never ending job, and it’s certainly going to keep hard drive manufacturers fighting hard to be YouTube’s storage supplier.

The rate of uploads doesn’t look like it will level out any time soon, either. In fact, Google is pushing for more video with the recent launch of 53 subscription channels. And if even a small percentage of those video uploads can generate revenue beyond just advertising, Google will continue to push for more content. A hundred hours a minute today will most certainly look tiny in comparison to uploads in just a couple of years from now.